Читать книгу Vigilante Days and Ways. The pioneers of the Rockies; the makers and making of Montana and Idaho онлайн

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Our Civil War was raging at the time that Lewiston became a mining emporium. Sympathizers with each party fled to the mines, to escape the possible responsibilities they might incur by remaining in the States. They carried their political views with them, and identified themselves with those portions of society which reflected their respective attachments. Loyalty and Secession each flourished by turn, and were the prolific causes of frequent bloody dissensions. There was no law to restrain human passion, so that each man was a law unto himself, according as he was swayed by the evil or good of his own nature. The temptations to evil, not so numerous, were much more powerful than were ever before presented to a great majority of the immigrants. Gambling and drinking were made attractive by the presence of debased women, who lured to their ruin all who, fortunate in the possession of gold, could not withstand their varied devices.

In the Spring of 1861, among the daily arrivals at Lewiston, was a man of gentlemanly bearing and dignified deportment, accompanied by a woman, to all appearance his wife. He took quarters at the best hotel in town. Before the close of the second day after his arrival his character as a gambler was fully understood, and in less than a fortnight his abandonment of his female companion betrayed the illicit connection which had existed between them. Alone, among strangers, destitute, the poor woman told how she had been beguiled, by the promises of this man, from home and family, and induced to link herself with his fortunes. A fond husband and three helpless children mourned her loss by a visitation worse than death. Lacking moral courage to return to her heart-broken husband and ask forgiveness, she sought to drown her sorrow by plunging still deeper into the abyss of shame and ruin. Soon, alas! she became one of the lowest inmates of a frontier brothel. This latest crime of Henry Plummer was soon forgotten, or remembered only as one of many similar events which occur in mining camps.